Arnhem

It was midnight when the boats arrived – and they turned out to be flimsy, with canvas sides and room for twelve men, not eighteen. A hurried reshuffle took place in the pitch dark, whispered orders, bodies falling over each other: chaos. With space on board now cut back, a third of the men were stood down to wait for a later crossing, Szmid among them. Finally, the boats were hauled across the boggy meadow and over a flood embankment to the river. As they set off into the current, flares popped into the sky, followed by an inferno of shells, bombs and bullets. There were many casualties. But the occupants of those that reached the other side slid overboard into the sticky mud of the north bank and ducked into the reeds. A British officer who stood by to guide them into Oosterbeek noted that they were wet and frightened but very determined. One was seen to pull out a bullet from a flesh wound in his leg with his fingers. These were hardened men and they had accounts to settle with the Germans.

In all, roughly two hundred Poles managed to get across that night to join the fight for Oosterbeek, a token force maybe, but their presence lifted spirits. Moving through the streets, they remembered heads popping out of trenches and wrecked window frames. British paras smiled through swollen lips and pleaded for cigarettes, which were tossed in their direction. The Poles took up defensive positions 600 yards from the Hartenstein in the south-eastern corner of the perimeter, some in houses, others in foxholes. An early-morning mortar attack was a shocking introduction to the realities of the dire military situation they had endured so much to join. Casualties were severe. One man lay dying, whispering for his mother in far-away Lvov. A lieutenant’s throat was ripped apart by a shard of shrapnel that found a gap beneath his chin.

Their presence did wonders for the morale of Private Bill Mollett, a bank clerk before the war, who had just spent hours on end at a window in the loft of a house, staring at a gap in the fence 150 yards in front of him and firing at the slightest movement. He was one of eleven men defending an isolated outpost on a crossroads, with orders, he recalled, to‘do or die’. Some were doing the latter. A mate was caught by a sniper’s bullet and died quickly, asking that someone tell his mother, and they were down to ten. The owner of the house struggled up from the cellar with a dish of cooked potatoes and spinach for them, and they felt better. Then, as an additional fillip, they saw movement in the abandoned house next door. ‘Some strange-looking blokes give me the thumbs-up and victory signs, and we realize they are the Poles, who jumped on the other side of the river and must now have got across. Everyone’s spirits rise and we give them covering fire while they move into our house and three other empty ones.’ ⁶

In one of those other houses was a hard-pressed Ron Kent, his heart in his boots after witnessing another brave but futile supplies drop where the panniers floated to the wrong side of the front line and the Dakota dropping them spiralled in flames into the trees. He turned away from the sight, sickened by war and the waste of good lives. He knew his position was hopeless. ‘This was a war of attrition. All the enemy had to do was keep blasting away at us from a distance. We would either die where we were or give up when lack of sleep and starvation forced us to. We were not going to be relieved. Then through a window I saw dim figures of men wearing our smocks and helmets. I was wary. It might be a German trick. My finger on the trigger, I challenged them and the answer came back, “Polish”. I could have dropped with relief.’ There were eighty of them, he noted, a goodly number to reinforce his ‘garrison’ of around thirty. But, battle-hardened himself, he was distressed at how un-savvy some of the Poles proved to be, many of them in action for the first time. ‘They stood about chattering, quite unaware of the danger of standing in large groups. Some went through the garden to the house next door and took ten casualties in fifteen minutes because they didn’t keep low to the ground. Their officer, a captain, was sniped and killed within five minutes of his arrival.’